Dr Sir John Whitman Ray Anniversary Message
2014
Hello everyone.
Each year, on the 21st of April, I post a note to remind us of the passing of Dr Sir John Whitman Ray, founder of Body Electronics. More importantly, he would say, it is also a reminder of some of the key principles he taught.
It has now been 13 years since he died. This would once have seemed to me to be a very long time ago, but it could now just about be yesterday as my own perspective on life changes. Certainly, life experience is a great one for perspective on anything, but today my reflections turn to one of the cornerstone principles of Body Electronics (and his advanced Visualisation and Consciousness work), by which all of us may be freed from limitation, the Law of Sanctification.
Indeed, John generally referred to it in the context of three laws:
- The Law of Justification (the lowest of the three)
- The Law of Purification (which encompasses, or you might say, supercedes the Law of Justification), and
- The Law of Sanctification (which further encompasses the Law of Purification).
This little trinity of laws essentially describes our spiritual evolution from our childish “eye for an eye”, “He hit me so I’m hitting him back” thinking, through to our more mature realisation of the need for self care, through to the final wisdom of, “We’re all in this together, so how about we help each other out here?”
The Law of Justification
The Law of Justification is all about our identification with the physical world, with cause and effect, with ideas of absolute right and absolute wrong, with “it’s all about me”, with “the end justifies the means”, with our perceived right to judge, with the cycle of life and death and mortality itself, with rejection of higher laws that bind us to the consequences of lower laws, etc.
For example, when we take a position of, “I’m right and you’re wrong” (usually because we just feel or “know” that we are in fact right, meaning we haven’t really considered the unpalatable possibility that we could be even a little bit wrong) we are immediately rejecting our ability to endure or entertain alternate perspectives (caused by our former suppression of pain), rejecting our ability to love unconditionally, and ultimately rejecting our ability to encompass duality. That’s a whole lot of evolutionary law violated right there. No wonder, that once we fall into justification, it’s nigh on impossible to extract ourselves from it, at least without knowledge of how to apply higher laws.
In such degraded states, we’d often rather die than let go of habitual justification of our actions or beliefs. We’re all there, folks: we often feel we'd rather die than see the truth. The evidence of this is all around us, although we have twisted it to again justify our current thinking.
With this kind of talk, it’s hard to imagine how the Law of Justification could even be considered a law, seeing as it seems to do nothing but suck us in to perpetual ignorance. However, in its day (and possibly still today for many of us), it was the only law that the people could receive, after having already rejected higher laws.
The thing is, we were created to be Perfect, to succeed in our spiritual path, not to be spiritual rejects. We were also created to have free will, so we would have to reach that Perfection through our own effort and choices – herein being the reason for the numerous detours we have taken along the way.
As John often said, “Obedience is the first Law of Heaven,” and by the way, the first one we chose to violate. Every law is provided as the means by which its attendant blessing might be realised. The whole universe and the hierarchy behind it are founded on sets of laws, not random circumstance. Thus, when one law is applied, a particular result arises; when a different law is applied, a different result arises. To be lawless, then, is to be beyond hope of personal redemption. OK, we might be plucked out of our misery and given a second chance, but in and of ourselves, to be without law is to be without hope of progress.
Thus, when higher laws are rejected (not applied in their proper time and place), lower laws that the individual may be able to apply more consistently are necessarily provided. If these lower laws, too, are rejected, then even lower laws (yet laws, nonetheless) are successively provided, that each one may eventually find their own level according to the law they are willing to apply and benefit from. No-one is entirely bereft of law that they can be successful in applying.
Lest anyone take issue with the idea of being in a degraded state, consider our own state of emotionality – to what extent are we loving unconditionally, to what extent are we even loving ourselves?
The Law of Purification
To move beyond the Law of Justification, into the Law of Purification, is a mighty leap forward and entails us committing to correct principle, insofar as we understand it. This understanding will of course be an ever growing knowledge, for as we begin to apply the laws we understand, greater understanding will arise from their use. When we are self-justified, we have no inclination to apply higher laws and therefore cannot benefit from them, but when we determine to elevate ourselves through our conscious and constructive endeavours (such as when we start to work on our List), the blessings start to flow.
The Law of Purification will entail the stripping away of all our encumbrances, starting with our physical, emotional and then mental bodies. On a mundane level, simply denying our self-justified desire to eat destructive foods, or engage in excessive or destructive behaviours, will immediately begin to cause discomfort in the body. This is the beginning of the Healing Crisis. As we further deny our desire to restore comfort by returning to our old ways (cravings and aversions), and especially if we begin to support the body with the right nutritional factors, our encumbrances will begin to fall away and greater mental clarity begin to arise. This is the beginning of our physical purification.
Thus, fairly plainly can we see that giving in to our justified feelings or beliefs prevents personal purification, whereas discipline brings about purification. You may then wonder how this so-called “Law” of Justification brings any benefit at all. It is, though, the foundation of most systems of man-made law and provides a good deal of structure for societies that subscribe to the notion of justice (the word “justice” itself being a contraction of “justification”).
Few societies have evolved to the point of being based on the Law of Forgiveness, and frankly, most of us are instantly challenged by the idea of what we would perceive as “criminals” getting off scot free (especially when we are the ones who have been "wronged"), which of course is why we haven’t created that kind of society, so enmeshed in justification and retribution are we – we believe and feel justified in thinking that the crime justifies the punishment. By and large, we believe in "just desserts." Of course, I am generalising.
Nonetheless, a committed effort not to submit to our justifications brings about the beginning of purification. Another way to think of the difference between justification and purification is that in justification we are primarily concerned with tearing down others, casting judgements or criticisms upon them, and condemning or relegating them to a lesser place in our own minds, if not through our actions, and therefore in their circumstance.
Even if we build one person up, it is at the expense of relegating another, thus the spirit of competition and our fixation on winning. We make judgements about the appearance, activity, or skills of others (and of ourselves), whether they love us enough, whether we or they are good enough, whether they have enough, always compared to some imagined “gold standard”. On the basis of our assessment we treat or think about them differently, according to how they (or we) “deserve” to be treated because we are now justified in doing so.
Whereas, with purification we become concerned with only tearing down ourselves and only with the purpose of building something better in its place. We strip away unnecessary layers of confusion, doubt, excess body substance, toxicity, and uncontrolled, habitual, dark self-centred thinking. On one hand, we are still self-centred, but now with a constructive aim and a degree of impartiality, or non-judgemental attitude towards others. We have stopped holding others back in our mind, stopped projecting our own negativity into the world, and begun to deal with our own darkness of mind.
The clarity we gain through purification gives us more certainty and precision on our path, as we begin to separate the “wheat from the chaff”. In justification, we have a “me only” focus – we see the world and the people in it the way we want to and use our creative ability on all levels to ensure they comply with that vision. In purification, there becomes the growing understanding of “me first”, in the sense that we learn to hold no judgement of others, accepting that they are free to be as they choose to create for themselves, thus allowing them to be as they are, and accepting responsibility for our own circumstance. Thus, when some apparent misfortune occurs, it is not because someone has done it to me (because everything is just about me), it is because we recognise that something within us has drawn this thing to us and we are therefore in a unique position to not abrogate responsibility onto “the world” (and everyone else in it) and look within to see what we can do about it. Self-centred, in a sense, yes, but not self-aggrandising or self-absorbed, thus we have progressed.
The Law of Sanctification
Not until we start applying the Law of Sanctification are we ready to understand that we-me-they are all one and the same. To reach this level we have to have encompassed sufficient levels of duality to experientially appreciate that there is no separation, other than the illusion of separation. When we see this, we realise that harm to another is harm to oneself and harm to oneself is harm to another; further, that blessing to one, and it doesn’t matter which one, is blessing to all.
Saint Germain referred to it this way: “I AM Here, I AM There, I AM Everywhere.” This decree is, in part, the recognition and command for there to be no separation.
Thus, in sanctification, the spirits of self-sacrifice and selflessness emerge as the dominant activities – not sacrifice for its own sake, but for the sake of another, knowing that when a blessing is received by another through our actions, there is no real sacrifice. In his latter days, John was fond of quoting some old beekeeping wisdom – “What’s good for the swarm is good for the bee.”
If I can put it another way, more bluntly, in case our egos get in the way of appreciating the gravity of this point – we’re all expendable when it comes to which life experience is necessary to be served up to another, hence our typically compulsory participation in group or collective karma. Although no life should be wasted or frivolously lost in the name of sacrifice, at the end of the day, our physical existence was only ever going to be temporary, and we will live again, if that is required for our progression. The permanent, enduring aspect of us never dies, so no physical sacrifice ever meaningfully touches the real us.
On the other hand, without some act of selflessness from somebody else, some of us will not easily progress, since we have dug such a hole for ourselves as to be somewhat lost in it. John talked about us all “crossing the finish line together,” wherein the desire to be first simply delays the collective us. In the Bible it’s expressed as, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” meaning that the act of separation from others, entering into “me only” justification mode, puts us not first (where we assume or desire ourselves to be), but last, effectively a liability to everyone else, who are encumbered by the acts of separation of even one individual.
Not meaning this to get too heavy, but everything we do to delight in our ways of judgement and justification delays not only us, but everybody else too. It’s a bit like one person deciding to jump off the ship for a swim, forcing the ship to have to turn around to collect its lost passenger. We are all in this together. We have incarnated together, we’re experiencing our collective karma together, and we need to progress together.
Edification
Sanctification sees us move into the mode of edifying others, building them up, even if that entails some sacrifice on our path. When we act from a position of justification (judgement, criticism, and condemnation) we tear others down, and ourselves along with it – remember, the ship is going to have to go back and pick up whoever you just threw overboard. Further, through our resistance to the faults we judge to exist in others, we karmically take those faults upon ourselves. Only by resolutely setting upon a path of personal purification will we gain the clarity and capacity to move beyond separation where we can then see the need to edify others, rather than tear them down, regardless of any faults we may have previously judged them to have.
This purification begins on the physical level, gradually exposing our suppressed emotionality. As we love this suppressed emotionality unconditionally and encompass duality, we purify the emotional body and thus gain access to our errant mentality, wherein the ongoing encompassment of duality gradually purifies the mental body. By the time we are learning to encompass duality we are already dabbling in sanctification, as we are learning to move beyond separation.
Purification on the physical, emotional and mental levels thus leads to the eventual realisation that “I” and “you” are not separate and we therefore become concerned with sanctification, that is, acts of a sanctifying nature. Although not intended to be our motivation, these sanctifying acts benefit us by virtue of their benefit to others.
In John 1:19 it is said, “For the law was given through Moses, but truth and grace came through Jesus Christ.”
In other words, the Mosaic laws (which were all manifestations of the mundane Law of Justification) were the highest laws that could be collectively received at that time and predominated throughout Old Testament Biblical times. Yet, by the advent of Christ, two higher laws could be revealed, which were Biblically represented by truth and grace:
- Truth refers to the self-realised truth that arises through continual application of the higher Law of Purification, leading to impartiality and encompassment of duality, as opposed to the opinions and self-justified beliefs that are associated with the Law of Justification.
- Grace refers to the blessings received by one through application of the Law of Sanctification by another.
Although these two new laws were indeed rejected by some at the time and still are to this day, there were also those ready to receive and apply the laws because of the purifying and sanctifying Presence of Christ, to all our benefit. We thus truly stand upon the shoulders of those who came before us and paid the price of self-sacrifice to perfect themselves and relieve our burdens somewhat. This leaves us in a much better place to finish the job, if we will.
We, in this day and age, are truly fortunate to have so much freely-available access to the wisdom of the ages. I count myself particularly fortunate to have been Dr John Whitman Ray’s student, for he has enabled me to decode many mysteries that I could quite possibly have remained ignorant of. I daresay that many of his students did not find him by chance, as on some level many will have been grappling with these spiritual issues for many lifetimes and quite possibly together.
However, there we have it – John has now gone and we remain to apply what we have learned. Many blessings to you each in your endeavours to do this and thanks again, John.
In Love, Light, and Perfection,
“I AM”
Graham Bennett
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